Banks and tech firms apply blockchain to trade finance

An HSBC and Bank of America Merrill Lynch venture and financial technology firm R3 said separately on Wednesday that they had created ways of using blockchain technology to simplify trade finance processes.
The two banks said they had joined with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore to emulate a letter of credit (LOC) transaction. Letters of credit are one of the most widely used ways to reduce risk between importers and exporters, helping guarantee more than $2 trillion worth of transactions, but the process creates a large paper trail and is time consuming.
Blockchain technology has the potential to save billions of dollars in costs and speed up transaction times. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction.